On Brendan O’Neill‘s self-titled blog, he replies to my article The long and winding road on Tuesday in which I praised him for rejecting the economic equivalent of ‘flat earth theory’, namely the infamous ‘fixed wealth fallacy’.
However whilst he agrees that he indeed rejects the sort of corporatist statist capitalism that we at Samizdata despise, he does not much care for our economic objectives: non-state centred laissez-faire capitalism. It is interesting that I was struck by the same paragraph in Brendan’s response as Adriana in her article (see below).
So Brendan does not want corporatist statist capitalism in which existing companies get subsidies from the state or use the state’s raft of regulations to make it hard for competitors to enter their market… but he also does not seem to like unregulated laissez-faire capitalism, which is based on market forces and voluntary contract free from the dead hand of the state.
Okay, as he states that he is not an ‘anti-capitalist’ because those ‘anti-capitalist’ guys are anti-growth, so he is obviously pro-growth. However he does not like ‘capitalists’ because for some reason he feels they can’t deliver “more development, more production and bigger and loftier ambitions”… the lofty ambitions however are left unstated. So it seems he does not want regulated hand-in-hand-with-the-state capitalism (i.e. ‘third way’ nonsense) and he does not want unregulated capitalism. I cannot help but see that the similarity between these two different ‘capitalisms’ Brendan rejects is that they both leave the means of production in private hands (though in reality only laissez-faire truly does). When presented with these two contrasting forms of ‘capitalism’, he asks if these are the only two ballgames in town? No, of course not, Brendan. We also have Marxist economics as an option.
So let me speculate as to what Brendan actually wants as he is not exactly spelling it out… he has often stated that he is a great fan of democracy, and in fact when I wrote an article scorning modern democracy, he seemed almost unwilling to believe I really intended to gore that particular sacred cow. However ‘democracy’ is one of those weasel words in that it does not always mean the same to different people. To some, like Brendan I suspect (and I am sure he will say otherwise if I am misrepresenting him), democracy means allowing ‘The People’ (whatever that means) to have democratic input into what any business actually does with its accumulated means of production. In short, ‘The People’ will act as a super-owner of land, labour and capital rather than leaving it to some capitalist ‘owners’: private property itself ceases to really be private anymore. The important thing here is not the economy but making everything democratic. In other words, ‘democratic socialism’.
On a purely historical basis, socialism is very big on “bigger and loftier ambitions”, but truly dire at producing “more development, more production”. Capitalism is demonstrably the best system for increasing development and production, and the less regulated it is, the better it works.
Yet the fact is, even if it was not the best economic system for achieving Brendan’s utilitarian aims of “more development, more production” (which it is), I would still support capitalism for what can only be described as my own “bigger and loftier ambitions”… sure I want more economic goodies but much more than that, I want liberty and that is not something the state can give me.
